The Wesleyan Church

Heritage

The Wesleyan Methodist Connection was organized in 1843 by Orange Scott and fellow abolitionists who left the Methodist Episcopal Church because it would not condemn slaveholding; five years later the Seneca Falls women's rights convention met in the Wesleyan Methodist chapel in that New York village, and in 1853 Wesleyan minister Luther Lee preached the ordination sermon of Antoinette Brown, the first woman ordained to pastoral ministry in America. The holiness revival reshaped the connection, and in 1968 it merged with the Pilgrim Holiness Church — itself a product of the revival — to form The Wesleyan Church, headquartered in Fishers, Indiana. RCMS 2020 counted 1,463 U.S. congregations.

Theological family

Wesleyan-holiness: salvation by grace, and entire sanctification — the heart made perfect in love — as the Spirit's work in believers, in the direct line of John Wesley's teaching, joined to a historic activism the church calls holiness applied to society.

Who decides what

Connexional: a General Conference and general superintendency, districts with superintendents, and local churches governed by boards — Methodist machinery serving a holiness message.

What a first-time visitor would find

A visitor finds warm evangelical worship, contemporary in most congregations, with an open altar and an expectation that grace changes people now; multiplication movements and multiethnic church plants are a growing share of the family.

What it has always cared about

Freedom — the church was born abolitionist; women in ministry, ordained from the earliest years; entire sanctification preached hopefully; and higher education through Indiana Wesleyan University, Houghton, and its sister schools.

Its gift to the wider church

The receipt proving holiness and justice are one package: before the Civil War this church staked its existence on the conviction that sanctified hearts cannot hold slaves, and its chapel at Seneca Falls sheltered the founding meeting of American women's rights — social conscience as a fruit of revival, not a rival to it.

Commonly confused with

With the United Methodist Church, the larger Wesleyan cousin from which its founders departed; with the Church of the Nazarene, its nearest holiness sibling, similar in doctrine and scale of ministry; and with the Free Methodists, a separate 1860 abolitionist-holiness exit from the same parent.

Range of views inside it

Congregations range from small revivalist churches to multisite congregations of national profile; the doctrine of holiness is constant, its idiom varies by generation and place.

Where The Wesleyan Church churches are on the map

713 The Wesleyan Church congregations appear on The Church Map, across 47 states.

• Indiana — 78
• Michigan — 69
• New York — 65
• North Carolina — 61
• Pennsylvania — 37
• South Carolina — 37
• Ohio — 29
• Virginia — 26
• Georgia — 19
• Florida — 19

Moments this body was part of

• 1867–1894 — The holiness revival

  A renewed hunger for Wesley's "entire sanctification" — stirred for decades by Phoebe Palmer's Tuesday meetings in New York — organized itself at a camp meeting in Vineland, New Jersey in 1867. Over the next generation the holiness movement spread through and then beyond Methodism, birthing the Church of God (Anderson), the Church of the Nazarene, the Wesleyan and Free Methodist streams, and the Salvation Army's American work.